McKeown Lecture: "just practice; practicing process"

Name: McKeown Lecture: "just practice; practicing process"
Start: 2026-05-08T13:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-05-08T14:00:00-07:00
Location: University of Oregon, Lawrence Hall 177

Schedule

Fri May 08 2026 at 01:00 pm to 02:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

University of Oregon, Lawrence Hall 177 | Eugene, OR

Lecture - just practice; practicing process
1 hour
just practice is a collaborative practice started by Amanda Ugorji and Sophie Weston Chien. They will be lecturing on their process and how their experiences and values shape their work as built environment professionals, educators, and textile designers. In addition to sharing their most recent pieces intersecting ideas of environmental justice, the built world, and narrative, they will be sharing how they have navigated collaboration, funding, and working sustainably. They hope for this lecture to serve as a case study for young practitioners imagining what is next.
Workshop - practicing process with just practice
75 minutes
In this workshop with just practice, we ask you to bring a project you feel most excited about being realized and imagine how to make it real with us. So much of what we do in school is framed as an exercise, but we are interested in thinking about how the ideas (and sometimes derivatives) can show up in your work outside of school. For roughly an hour, we will talk through embedded values, potential collaborators, design agency, and what success would look like to you. We hope to foster a broader conversation with peers. Please submit an image associated with the project and a three-sentence description in advance.
Bio
just practice (Amanda Ugorji and Sophie Weston Chien) spans architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, community engagement, textile, and graphic design, as well as activist and organizing work within the design field. We think about modes of practice, the spatialization of memory, Black feminist practices, the historical role of women in architecture, and strategies for collective care. just practice has exhibited at Northeastern University, Mills College, MIT Museum, Boston Public Library Leventhal Map Center, MIT Rotch Architecture Gallery, Yale School of Art and Boston Society of Architects, and our work is in private collections and in the permanent collection at the MIT Museum. Our piece Soft City was awarded the inaugural City Talks Digital Gallery Award from the Spatial Analysis Lab at USC, and we were finalists for the Harvard University Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition.
Sophie is from North Carolina, and Amanda is from Massachusetts.
This memorial lecture was created by friends and family members of our department’s alumna, Mary Kim McKeown. She received her bachelor of landscape architecture from the University of Oregon in 1982 and was working in Mill Valley, California in the offices of Royston, Hanamoto, Alley and Abey (now RHAA). McKeown was considered one of the bright ones, and an up-and-coming leader for the firm. She lost her life when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area on October 17, 1989.
To honor her memory, McKeown’s family and her associates at RHAA dedicated themselves to establishing this memorial lecture fund. An endowment fund at the UO Foundation was created, and in 1992 the department hosted Robert Royston of RHAA as the inaugural speaker in this lecture series.